Trump warned companies of “retribution or consequences” for leaving the U.S. Donald Trump warned U.S. companies of “retribution or consequences,” such as a massive tariff, if they leave the country. In a series of early morning tweets Sunday, Trump said companies with offshore factories would face a 35% tax on products they want to sell back in the U.S. “The U.S. is going to substantialy [sic] reduce taxes and regulations on businesses, but any business that leaves our country for another country, fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will...

It might not be a great time to start offshore drilling, with oil prices as depressed as they are, but it might just be a great time to buy an offshore drilling rig for a cut-rate price—in fact, you might be able to get one for only one tenth of what they cost in 2011. This is the cost coup recently pulled off by Ocean Rig, a company controlled by shipping billionaire George Economou, who has landed a drillship—the Cerrado—for only US$65 million at auction, which represents less than 10 percent of the estimated price when it was built over...

What would Hermione Granger say? Actress Emma Watson has been named in the so-called "Panama Papers" as having used a company based in a Caribbean tax haven to handle her money, it was revealed Tuesday. The 26-year-old, who is taking a break from acting to work as a United Nations goodwill ambassador and women's rights campaigner, is a shareholder in one of approximately 200,000 offshore corporations whose information was published online Monday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Bernie Sanders loves to denounce the tax dodges of the wealthy (even as he pays 13.4% income tax on a $200K+ income), so it would be interesting to hear what he has to say about John Kerry, the current secretary of state and former Democratic Party nominee for president.Â An analysis of public documents by the Daily Caller News Foundation indicates that Kerry and his wife liberally use offshore tax havens.Â Richard Pollock writes: â€¦ a DCNF investigation has confirmed that the former Massachusetts Democratic senator and his billionaire wife, using an elaborate set of Heinz family trusts, have...

The Obama administration unveiled new regulations on offshore drilling on Thursday, rules that were several years in the making. The regulations stem from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a well blowout that resulted in the death of 11 workers and one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. The regulations call for new well-control measures, limits the volume of fluids that can be injected into wells, and requires heightened well monitoring. ExxonMobil and other companies say the rules will impose costs as high as $25 billion over the next decade, pushing many offshore projects...

he prime minister of Iceland resigned on Tuesday, succumbing to political pressure two days after an enormous leak of documents from a secretive Panamanian law firm about offshore shell companies and tax shelters. The resignation of the prime minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, was the first prominent political fallout from the document leaks known as the Panama Papers, which have shed a harsh light on the private financial activities of many rich and powerful people.

A network of secret offshore deals and vast loans worth $2bn has laid a trail to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. An unprecedented leak of documents shows how this money has made members of Putin’s close circle fabulously wealthy. Though the president’s name does not appear in any of the records, the data reveals a pattern...The documents suggest Putin’s family has benefited from this money – his friends’ fortunes appear his to spend….. The Panama Papers disclose that Kovalchuk and Bank Rossiya achieved the transfer of at least $1bn to a specially created offshore entity called Sandalwood Continental. These funds came...

The massive Leviathan gas field was discovered in Israel’s offshore Levant Basin over six years ago, and while it theoretically puts Israel on the global energy map for the first time and could change the geopolitical dynamics of the entire Middle East, the Israelis themselves seem to be doing everything in their power to keep it from coming online. Its owners—U.S.-based Noble Energy and Israeli partner Delek Group—along with their shareholders are probably wondering if gas is ever going to come out of this giant of giants. At stake is a massive gas field worth $5-$6 billion and believed to...

ConocoPhillips officials say the company will stop searching for oil and gas in deep-water fields by 2017, and it plans to sell the offshore leases it doesnâ€™t intend to drill. Its exit from deep-water exploration would free up roughly $800 million in capital, the amount it has budgeted for exploration next year. Plus, it will save on costs on that side of the business, Matt Fox, ConocoPhillips' executive vice president of exploration and production, told investors on Thursday. â€śItâ€™s a strategic decision to exit deep-water exploration,â€ť Fox said. It is part of the companyâ€™s plan to sell $1 billion to...

Offshore engineering company McDermott International’s stock shot up by more than 30 percent Wednesday after the company said it had landed a $1.5 billion-plus contract with Saudi Aramco. McDermott CEO David Dickson called the contract an important step in a turnaround for the Houston-based company, which as recently as 2013 had been struggling to build offshore platforms and support structures profitably. Investors sent the company’s shares up $1.03 to $4.49 in midday trading Thursday. “We had a tough time through the end of 2013; 2014 was a real turnaround,” Dickson said in an interview with FuelFix. He joined McDermott in...

Activists trying to stop Shell’s offshore oil drilling in the U.S.’s Arctic Ocean region invoke the interests of native Alaskans. “These communities depend on this environment for food and resources and have stewarded it for centuries,” Greenpeace says, as part of its “The People vs. Shell” campaign—what the group describes as possibly “the most important fight in environmental history.” A lot of native Alaskans, including many who live along the state’s North Slope, would prefer that Greenpeace mind its own business.

The developer of the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm installed the first steel foundation for the project off Rhode Island’s coast. The Sunday installation of Deepwater Wind Block Island Wind Farm came just in time for a Monday tour of the site that will include Obama administration officials, lawmakers and Rhode Island’s governor, among others. ADVERTISEMENT “It was a very big moment,” Jeffrey Grybowski, Chief Executive Officer of Deepwater Wind, told the Providence Journal shortly after watching the first foundation’s installation from a boat. The company had hoped to install the foundation on Thursday, but the weather did not...

Ridgewood Energy is not letting $50 oil shift its aim. The energy company focused on the deep-water Gulf of Mexico closed a nearly $2 billion private equity fund that it contends will still prove profitable. Houston- and New Jersey-based Ridgewood said its new $1.94 billion, Ridgewood Energy Oil & Gas Fund III is its biggest yet and exceeded its initial $1.5 billion target. As other companies slow down their expensive deep-water Gulf investments, Ridgewood says it can find and develop oil there for $20 a barrel or less, although the break even is closer to $35 a barrel with other...

The Obama administration delivered a major blow to Shell’s Arctic drilling plans on Tuesday, by ruling that wildlife protections bar the company from simultaneously boring two wells into the Chukchi Sea this summer. The decision will force Shell to scale back its hopes of completing two exploratory oil wells in waters north of Alaska this summer and is another setback for the firm that has spent seven years and $7 billion trying to find crude in the Arctic Ocean. At issue is the Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to allow sound from Shell’s planned drilling to disturb walruses, polar bears...

Alaska's crude oil production has declined from 1.8 million barrels per day (MMb/d) in 1991 to 0.5 MMb/d in 2014, and it is expected to continue declining through 2040. Almost 75% of Alaska's crude oil production from 1990 to 2012 was from the Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk River fields in the central North Slope, which respectively produced 4.9 billion and 1.7 billion barrels of crude oil over this period. Crude oil production in Alaska is sensitive to the challenging environment—including variable ice conditions and limited time without ice coverage—as well as pipeline economics. However, recent conditional approval granted to Royal...

Mexican state oil company Pemex announced five new shallow­water discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico in what it said was its biggest exploration success in five years. Emilio Lozoya, Pemex chief, made the announcement at the inauguration of a national oil and gas conference one month before Mexico’s historic first oil and gas tender. The July 15 auction, of 14 shallow­water exploration blocks in the same area as the new discoveries, is expected to signal the start of billions of dollars in private investment flowing into the sector. “The certain prospect of 200,000 extra barrels of production is very good...

In the largest expansion of national marine sanctuaries in California in 23 years, the Obama administration on Tuesday more than doubled the size of two Northern California marine sanctuaries, extending them by 50 miles up the rugged Sonoma and Mendocino coasts. Under the dramatic move by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the boundaries of the Gulf of the Farallones and Cordell Bank national marine sanctuaries expand from Bodega Bay to Point Arena, permanently banning offshore oil drilling along that stretch of coast. "These waters represent an extraordinary marine ecosystem, one of the richest on our planet," said Maria Brown,...

North Coast state Sen. Mike McGuire’s bill to permanently ban new oil drilling in state waters along the 840-mile California coast was approved by the Senate Wednesday and now moves to the Assembly. Calling the coast a “worldwide wonder,” McGuire, D-Healdsburg, said his bill will protect the natural beauty of the coast, which draws 150 million visitors a year and contributes $40 billion to the state economy. The bill closes a loophole in a 1994 law that banned oil and gas development in state waters, which extend out three miles from shore, but permitted exceptions in cases where state oil...

Plains All American Pipeline, the company which owns the pipeline at the centre of an oil spill off the coast of California, on Monday downgraded the amount of oil it says spilled in a worst-case scenario. The company said the estimate of the worst-case volume of oil released was up to 101,000 gallons – about 4,200 gallons less than previously believed. Plains All American is still cleaning up the spill along the Santa Barbara County coastline and recovering oil from the pipeline, so the calculations are not final.

NEW ORLEANS – A committee of lawyers representing businesses and individuals claiming damages from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill announced a $211 million settlement Wednesday with Transocean Ltd., owner of the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

An estimated 21,000 gallons of oil dumped into the ocean from a broken pipeline just off the central California coast before it was shut off on Tuesday, creating a spill stretching about 4 miles along the beach, the U.S. Coast Guard said. Santa Barbara County health officials have shut down Refugio State Beach, the central site of the spill, though many had abandoned the site already because of the foul smell. That smell brought county firefighters to the beach earlier in the day to discover the spill. “They found about a half-mile slick of dark, black crude oil in the...

Offshore driller Transocean has idled three more deep water rigs, bringing its number of out-of-work units to 15, it said Monday, as the oil slump continued to hammer the drilling market. The Swiss rig contractor with corporate offices in Houston has idled 10 rigs and stacked five others, and it has said it plans to sell 19 units for scrap. Idle rigs are between contracts; stacked machines are shut down for longer periods, and scrapped rigs are torn apart for their steel hides. Transocean owns or has a stake in 65 offshore rigs around the world. The three Transocean rigs...

For project developers seeking the next big petro-play, some key news this week. With lawmakers in America moving to open one of the biggest swaths of new acreage in the history of the industry. On Tuesday, the U.S. senate introduced three bills to expand areas accessible for oil and gas drilling -- targeting the eastern Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean, and the Arctic. The Gulf of Mexico acreage would be the nearest play at hand. With this week's bill contemplating allowing drilling in this area as early as 2017.

According to US federal records reviewed by the Associated Press, Louisiana-based LLOG Exploration Offshore plans to engage in deepwater drilling in the Macondo reservoir. The AP says Harper's Magazine first reported the drilling plans late Tuesday. The BSEE green-lighted LLOG's permit to drill a new well near the Macondo site on April 13. Last October, the company's exploration plan was approved after the conclusion of an environmental review conducted by the BOEM. Referring to the 2010 Macondo incident which occurred in the same reservoir, LLOG's vice president for deepwater projects, Rick Fowler, told the AP, "Our commitment is not to...

...Shell acquired the lease for just over $2 billion in 2008, and, absent a very good reason, the government felt obliged to approve it. Shell will be bound by safeguards that did not exist seven years ago. Several factors — including lawsuits and vigorous lobbying by environmental groups, widespread public dismay caused by the 2010 BP oil spill, and Shell’s ineptitude in earlier trial runs — have led the government to devise rules that are likely to make this project safer than it would have been. Shell is seeking to drill up to six exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea...

ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance said Tuesday that the Obama administration’s decision to allow a competitor’s Arctic drilling program to move forward has provided some, but not all, of the clarifications they were looking in their own projects in the region. The U.S. government on Monday gave Shell’s $6 billion plan to explore for crude oil in the northern Chukchi Sea a preliminary OK, reviving exploration plans that have faced significant political, engineering and cost challenges. Lance said that the go-ahead given to Shell’s program has not resolved all of ConocoPhillips’ Arctic questions. “A lot of the [regulations] are still subject...

Cuba unveiled new data on Wednesday it said confirmed there were billions of barrels of oil beneath its Gulf of Mexico waters but admitted there was little interest in new exploration even with the thaw in U.S. relations. The United States and Cuba have vowed to restore diplomatic relations after more than 50 years of animosity, but the comprehensive U.S. trade embargo remains in place. While U.S. tourism, transportation and agriculture companies position themselves for Cuban business, oil companies have proven less eager since three exploratory wells came up dry in 2012. Low oil prices and new opportunities in Mexico's...

HOUSTON — Offshore platforms have a lot of hard-to-reach places, and a first-time exhibitor at the Offshore Technology Conference wants to use flying robots to make those tough corners more accessible. U.K.-based Sky-Futures has built a business using drones to inspect areas such as the underbelly of offshore platforms and burning flare stacks. The company’s co-founder and CEO James Harrison — who spent years working with information-gathering drones in Iraq and Afghanistan — said using the robots to do the inspection work makes it more efficient and safer. Historically, crews of workers inspecting those spots have had to dangle from...

A ruling by the city of Seattle may throw a wrench into ShellÂ’s Arctic drilling plans, but it wonÂ’t delay the companyÂ’s plans to bore two new wells in the Chukchi Sea this summer, a top executive vowed Tuesday. Although Â“itÂ’s not my preferred approach . . . we have backup plans,Â” said Ann Pickard, Royal Dutch ShellÂ’s executive vice president for the Arctic. Â“I donÂ’t think this will delay the program.Â” At issue is Seattle Mayor Ed MurrayÂ’s ruling this week that the city port must obtain a new land-use permit to serve as a home base for ShellÂ’s...

An accident on an oil well-maintenance platform killed two workers and injured 10 off Mexico’s coast on Tuesday, company officials reported, blaming the incident on the collapse of one of the rig’s legs. State oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, said the Troll Solution rig was maneuvering to perform offshore maintenance at the time of the accident in the Bay of Campeche, in the Gulf of Mexico. Pemex blamed a structural failure in the leg. The rig was “listing” but had not sunk, the company said via Twitter.

HOUSTON – High-horsepower pumps and big hydraulic fracturing trucks, the primary tools used to bust open U.S. shale rock, have carved out parking spaces of their own at the Offshore Technology Conference. They’re an attraction for foreign onlookers interested in the technology that brought a rush of American oil to market. But more and more, they’re a jumping off point for oil producers looking to break open hard sandstone reservoirs found in deeper offshore fields, like at Chevron’s Jack/St. Malo project in the Gulf of Mexico. Offshore producers have fractured conventional wells for decades, but advances in the landlocked U.S....

Folks, there is exactly one way you're going to put a stop to this sort of nonsense: At the end of October, IT employees at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts were called, one-by-one, into conference rooms to receive notice of their layoffs. Multiple conference rooms had been set aside for this purpose, and in each room an executive read from a script informing the worker that their last day would be Jan. 30, 2015. Some workers left the rooms crying; others appeared shocked. This went on all day. As each employee received a call to go to a conference room,...

Like cars, some microbes use oil as fuel. Such microorganisms are a big reason why BP's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was not far worse. "The microbes did a spectacular job of eating a lot of the natural gas," says biogeochemist Chris Reddy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The relatively small hydrocarbon molecules in natural gas are the easiest for microorganisms to eat. "The rate and capacity is a mind-boggling testament to microbes," he adds. As Reddy suggests, the microbes got help from the nature of the oil spilled—so-called Louisiana light, sweet crude mixed with natural...

As a response to lower oil prices, E&P companies have guided considerable cuts in their 2015 investment budgets. Preliminary budgets indicate a ~20% drop in global E&P investments this year, with shale declining the most. Observing historical trends, Figure 1 shows global investments for offshore and shale oil and gas. During the past decade, offshore investments have increased from ~ US$150 billion in 2005 to ~ US$360 billion in 2014. The growth in offshore investments is a combination of higher activity and higher unit costs (i.e., rig rates). Also over the last 10 years, shale activity accelerated as horizontal hydraulic...

NEW ORLEANS — As oil gushed from BP’s ruptured well five years ago and public outrage built by the day, the Obama administration issued a six-month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. When the well was finally capped after nearly three months, political and industry pressure mounted on the White House to lift the ban, which it did about a month earlier than planned. Since then, oil and gas drilling Gulf has bounced back strongly and the number of deep-water drilling rigs has actually increased from 35 to about 48. Drillers are pushing into even deeper water and...

The Obama administration is eyeing an auction of offshore oil drilling leases along the East Coast in 2021, but that’s not enough to keep the United States competitive with other Atlantic nations, a Shell executive told Congress on Wednesday. “The Gulf of Mexico has kept the United States globally competitive for decades,” Mark Shuster, Shell’s executive vice president of upstream Americas exploration, told a House Natural Resources subcommittee. “The U.S. stands to lose a lot if we don’t make new acreage available.” At issue is the Interior Department’s draft plan for selling oil and gas leases on the U.S. outer...

Access to images perhaps similar to those that captivated viewers in real time around the world during the Deepwater Horizon disaster would be standard procedure under a new set of proposed federal offshore guidelines. These include the live monitoring of deepwater and high-temperature/high pressure drilling activities, similar to what is currently used onshore. “The real-time monitoring requirement ensures that the operator has access to onshore technical expertise if needed and that there is ‘another set of eyes’ available during critical operations,” according to the statement. Houston personal injury lawyer Charles Herd, a partner at The Lanier Law Firm, which represented...

Wednesday morning, social network users reported a fire on the dwelling platform Abkatun Alfa located in Mexico's oil-rich Bay of Campeche. According to local media reports, the Abkatun Alpha is a dwelling platform purposed for housing personnel working offshore in the Bay of Campeche. Early reports also indicate it is owned by a private firm subcontracted by Pemex. Preliminary information indicates a failure in operation processes caused the fire. The incident prompted the evacuation of the platform. Some injuries were also reported. The injured were transported via helicopter from the rig to hospitals in Ciudad del Carmen. One death, 48...

Exxon Mobil Corp. said Monday it had begun producing from its Hadrian South Gulf of Mexico project. Total production of the project is expected to reach about 300 million cubic feet of gas and 3,000 barrels of liquids per day from two wells. The well is located about 230 miles offshore and in about 7,650 feet of water. First production comes after a discovery well was drilled in 2008 and an appraisal well was completed in 2009. Exxon operates the Hadrian South project with a 46.7 percent interest while Brazil’s Petrobras and Italy’s Eni hold a 23.3 percent and 30...

Not so long ago, advanced drillships costing more than half a billion dollars each and capable of operating in ever-deeper waters practically guaranteed big profits for oil-rig operators. Now, with oil prices down by half since June, many have become a burden on their owners as drilling activity slows. Drillship operators face a more brutal hit to margins than they did after the oil-price crash of 2008 because of the huge cost of maintaining the more than $10 billion worth of state-of-the-art vessels that have been idled at sea, analysts say. Noble Corp Plc, Ensco Plc and Transocean Ltd are...

As the Obama administration weighs where to sell offshore drilling leases from 2017 to 2022, the oil industry has a single plea: Stop ruling out potential prospects. Eight industry trade groups are delivering that message in comments set to be filed with the administration on Monday, ahead of a midnight deadline for the public to weigh in on the Interior Department’s draft proposed offshore leasing program for 2017 to 2022. “Considerable acreage has already been excluded at this early stage of the planning process, especially in the Atlantic, eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska outer continental shelf,” said the groups,...

Reminder, The City Is Also Home To Boeing, The World's Largest Jet Maker If a plane flies over Seattle, does anyone hear it? Probably not, because they’re all down at the docks protesting the parking of drilling rigs used in the Arctic. When the port of Seattle agreed to allow Shell to park drill ships on the city’s waterfront, a “kind of civic call to arms” erupted, according to the New York Times. “A unanimous City Council lined up alongside the mayor to question the legality of the agreement with the Port of Seattle, a court challenge was filed by...

For years before “drill, baby, drill” became a Republican rallying cry, Jeb Bush was one of Florida’s staunchest opponents of offshore drilling. As the governor of the tourist mecca, Bush fought to maintain Florida’s status as the only Gulf Coast state with no offshore oil and gas production — opposing even the administration of his brother, President George W. Bush, when it sought to open new waters to drilling. The governor and his administration boasted of being Florida’s firewall against the rigs, citing it as one of his top environmental accomplishments and taunting both Al Gore and John Kerry for...

The licensees in the Johan Castberg and Snorre 2040 licences have decided to spend more time on the projects. “Castberg and Snorre 2040 are two major and important projects in our portfolio, and it is important that we find sound and robust development solutions for them,” says Ivar Aasheim, Statoil’s senior vice president for field development on the NCS. Statoil and its partners have put in an extensive effort to develop cost-effective solutions for the projects. “We see that our efforts have yielded results, and we are focused on reaping the full benefits of this in a way that ensures...

The administration released in late January its draft five-year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing, the game plan for what areas will be open for exploration and how they will be managed. By no small coincidence, opponents of offshore exploration are now beating the drum to close off areas to oil and gas and put the emphasis entirely on wind power. As a country, we cannot take an either/or approach to our energy needs by picking just one source, whether it is wind or hydrocarbons. That is why the Administration’s stated goals of an “all of the above” energy...

As the litigation for the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill lurches through the legal system, the case has become a magnet for those seeking to take advantage of the deep-pockets oil industry defendant. In addition to those looking to prosper directly from the spill, the environmentalists and their mainstream media allies have exploited the situation to make their case against the use of oil in general -- and more specifically, against offshore drilling and oil production. If you restrict your reading on the topic to what appears in the mainstream media, you may be convinced that the science shows the...

Seadrill disclosed this morning that two of its three-year contracts for ultra-deepwater rigs with Petrobras in Brazil have failed. Seadrill had booked $1.1bn into its backlog associated with the contracts last quarter. That backlog, and the six rig years of work it represents, is now being written off as the contracts are no longer expected to be honored as signed. While there has been a sprinkling of offshore rig contract terminations here and there since oil prices started falling, most have been for contracts well underway and most have been related to a single operator, Statoil, that has been right-sizing...

Norway's BW Offshore confirmed Thursday that of the 74 persons onboard the Cidade de Sao Mateus FPSO, there have been five fatalities, with four crew still missing. The remaining crew are all accounted for and receiving medical care where needed, with two in critical condition and for safety reasons, have all been taken off the unit. The next of kin have been informed and all personnel are being attended to by a special support team established by BW Offshore Brazil. Search and rescue operations continued into the night following the explosion onboard the Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) unit...

Offshore driller Hercules Offshore has laid off 30 percent of its workforce since October, company officials said on a conference call with analysts Thursday. The Houston-based company had about 2,200 employees, according to its most recent annual report. A company executive said Hercules has shed 672 workers in several rounds of layoffs in recent months. That would be just about double the number of employees Hercules said it would lay off by the end of December in a similar announcement last year. John Rynd, the company’s CEO, also said the company may consider cutting its contribution to workers’ 401K plans...

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) and the U.S. Coast Guard are preparing to investigate an unmanned platform off the coast of Louisiana that has been damaged, BSEE said in a statement. The platform is operated by Energy XXI, GOM, LLC, and is located in 50 feet of water in South Timbalier (ST) Block 27 in the Gulf of Mexico, about 5 miles south of port Fourchon, Louisiana. Energy XXI reported to BSEE at approximately 4:30 a.m. that the ST 27 IA platform had been damaged, and that the damage was possibly caused by a vessel. There was...